Crowds of people move in highly predictable ways and are best navigated at the edges, rather than the inside of the pack, and by staying in a naturally-formed line instead of racing forward, according to a Wired article that quotes SFI External Professor Dirk Helbing

“There’s a lot of self-organization in crowds, but the problems come when people transition from a flow to stop-and-go-then things get turbulent,” explains Helbing, who has studied self-organization phenomena in pedestrian crowds through nonlinear modeling and multi-agent simulation.

Read the Wired article (November 1, 2011)